An afternoon of film, performative lectures and sound from artists engaging with diverse social and technological practices from biohacking and flavor chemistry to rituals of lamentation.

Programme

3D Screening: The Flavor Genome (2016) / 4pm Anicka Yi’s 3D film The Flavor Genome follows a commercial flavourist through the rainforests and jungles of the Amazon in search a rare and mythologised orchid. Extending Yi’s use of sensorial devices, beyond those of sight and sound, the potentials of touch, taste, smell and other biological attributes are brought into focus.

Molecular Queering Agency / 4.30pmOur world is filled with toxicities. Thanks to petrochemical, agricultural and pharmaceutical industries, these endocrine-disrupting molecules queer our bodies and the bodies of non-human species. This can be seen as a form of slow violence that is pervasive yet difficult to perceive, at the same time challenging society's prescribed notions of what is deemed normal and natural.

Artist Mary Maggic’s Molecular Queering Agency performative workshop is a discursive exercise for living in a toxic world. It uses various methods of 'freak science' to extract hormones from urine, demonstrating the molecular colonisation of this 'alien' becoming.

À la recherche de l’information perdue / 5.30pm On the other side of reality we encounter suspected heroes, leaks and phreaks, engineers of escape who control our secret desires. Rape can be performed in many ways. In a state of total transparency: what shall we eat, when society feeds upon the repressed? Knowing yourself means knowing what to look for.

Artist, cyberfeminist and hacker Cornelia Sollfrank presents a performance lecture in which she enters in the realm of zeros and ones, of data and pure information, of ciphers, signifiers and figures.

Her Voice / 6.30pm Artists and writers Eleni Ikoniadou and Demelza Toy Toy present a performative reading mapping the mythological, historical and future-oriented dimensions of the female voice through the cultural ritual of lamentation.

Participants

Eleni Ikoniadou is a writer, researcher, teacher and practitioner specialising in digital media and sonic arts. She is founder and director of the Audio Culture Research Unit (ACRU), crew member of AUDINT and author of The Rhythmic Event (2014).

Mary Maggic is an artist and biohacker working at the intersection of biotechnology and cultural discourse. Their most recent projects Open Source Estrogen and Estrofem! Lab seek to subvert dominant biopolitical agents of hormonal management, knowledge production and anthropogenic toxicity. Maggic holds a BSA in Biology and Art from Carnegie Mellon University and a MS in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT Media Lab.

Cornelia Sollfrank (PhD) is an artist, researcher and university lecturer who is based in Berlin. Recurring subjects in her artistic work in and about digital media and network culture are new forms of (political) organization, authorship and intellectual property, gender and techno-feminism. She was co-founder of the collectives women-and-technology, -Innen and the Old Boys Network and currently does research at Zürich University of the Arts in the field of art and commons.

Demelza Toy Toy is an artist working with performance, sound and collaborative modes of practice as strategies of resistance to narratives of cultural dominance.

Anicka Yi, born 1971 Seoul, lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Life is Cheap, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017), Jungle Stripe, Fridericianum, Kassel (2016) and 7,070,430K of Digital Spit, Kunsthalle Basel. In 2017 she participated in numerous group exhibitions including The Dream of Forms, Palais De Tokyo, Paris, 56 Artillery Lane, Raven Row, London and the Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Artist Anicka Yi discusses her 3D video The Flavor Gnome (2017), screening as part of Post-Cyber Live Programme

ICA: How did the concept for The Flavor Genome evolve? How does this piece relate to your wider practice?

Anicka Yi: The impetus to make The Flavor Genome was at once an immediate challenge to locate my desires in a specific biological 'place' (that place was the Brazilian Amazon for all its mythical connotations and contradictions) in order to test the limits of the questions posed throughout my practice leading me to the 'ultimate' petri dish, a tropical ecosystem, while also attempting to write the treatise on my practice with this film. In this sense, the film is a form of praxis and theory merged into one project.

What is the relationship between fact and fiction in the film? Does the narrative follow scientific fact?

The film is an example of the bio-fiction that MIT scholar Caroline Jones speaks about my work. For me, it means that which fuses the writing of life with the study of life which also now includes the embrace of nonhuman persons. Non-human persons is a concept used by indigenous people in the Amazon for example. All life is a person - a plant person, an animal person, a human person. Humans are exactly at the top of this hierarchy of life. The narrative mostly adheres to scientific fact, but one aspect of the film is to distinguish the limits of science as well as the fictionality of science.

What are your conceptual intentions of using 3D video in the work?

3D video is closer to smell than 2D video. I needed the fullest dimensionality just short of VR for this project. There's also a complex relationship with an almost obsolete technology such as 3D video that speaks to the dislocation of the narrative in terms of time.

How does the exotic location of The Flavor Genome contribute to ideas of hybridity you explore in the work?

I wanted to explore biological adaptation, extinction. The Brazilian Amazon jungle is an extremely competitive ecosystem for survival. In order to survive there, one must be able to adapt due to the extreme conditions there - the heat, the acidic soil. This explains the many many species and varieties of flora and fauna. However, the extinction rate is also fairly rapid for there are many species that are not able to adapt so adroitly. This film is a way to reflect back humanity's own extinction vulnerability. Hybrids are a 'natural' and 'unnatural' mitigation to the extinction/survival problem.